Antheil, George

signed and inscribed by the composer on the front cover and on the title ("For Bob and Judy Butts with love from the composer for all these years of friendship which helped much to write this symphony - Affectionately George Antheil 1945...composer's personal "correction" copy"), with autograph correction to the title ("1942"); the composer's annotations in black ink including some short passages of re-composition, with additional passages of orchestration, expression markings and deletions, also with performance instructions for the conductor and notes of cuts, several passages, especially at the end of the second movement and in the fourth movement, on strips of manuscript paper, laid down

156 pages (including pp. "72a" and "72b"), folio (38.5 x 28cm), printed from the composer's autograph manuscript, 24 staves to a page, ring-bound card wrappers, Hollywood, 1945, some tears and creasing to upper cover

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This is a large-scale, extrovert work by George Antheil, whose celebrated autobiography (which also appeared in 1945) is entitled Bad Boy of Music. The present score of the Fourth Symphony contains the composer's final version, incorporating important changes to the orchestration and to the music throughout. The work was composed in 1942 and premiered by the NBC Symphony Orchestra under Leopold Stokowski on 13 February 1944. Also included with this lot are three pages of typed transcripts containing excerpts from the enthusiastic reviews of early performances of the work:

...As American as baseball, as modern as tomorrow's paper, this war symphony has the exciting overpowering quality of a juggernaut. The second movement, written after the fall of Lidice, contains a refrain of nostalgic beauty, as hauntingly sad as the strains sometimes heard on a hand organ on a spring evening. The scherzo is more like a brutal joke - the brutal joke of war - and the fourth movement which was written after the turn of the tide at Stalingrad and our landings in Morocco, heralds victory...

The symphony is regarded as one of Antheil's most important and challenging compositions. Written following his experiences as a war correspondent, it was considered by the composer as a 'musical rebirth' for him, in that it reconciled his symphonic aspirations with the music styles he used in his film music.